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The first time, it sounds like rain. You almost don’t wake up to the rhythmic tapping, but there’s something heavy entwined in each stuttering step that it jolts you awake before you can fight it. It definitely isn’t rain and as you yawn softly into your hands, the noise becomes more distinct. A footstep, then a swipe along the hardwood floor. Another solid step. Silence.
Quietly, you soak in the sounds, and slowly, your brain puts together the pieces. It’s Saeyoung, because the bed feels empty before you even stretch to his side, and who else could be prancing about during twilight hours but him? You want to call out to him, but instead, you listen. A step, then a slide, then another step. He chuckles softly and you can hear pity in the echoes of his laughter. Your heart aches without a clear reason in that moment.
“Saeyoung,” you whisper to the darkness, and you can hear the slide of his feet across the floor. There are no more steps afterwards, only silence. His feet shuffle across the darkness of the bedroom until you feel him collapse back into the bed noiselessly. The sky outside is dark and there are no windows here, because all you can think about is how he would look dappled by moonlight. Saeyoung, half-dressed and ruffled by insomnia, dancing in his bedroom.
“The stars,” he says absently, and you know that he’s referring to the plastic ones you’d bought a while back. They’d been quite a task to handle, but you’d plastered them all around the house, in almost every room. In the middle of the day, they’re an easy decoration to ignore, but lying in bed, they gleam back down from the ceiling. “They make me feel…far away.”
You reach for Saeyoung’s hands and pull them towards your chest, cradling them close when he lets you. He does this often—both of you do. You travel light years away from where anyone can reach either of you, wishing to be undying black giants. Tonight is a night where he is lost on the horizon, trying to navigate his way back to Earth.
“Do you want me to take them down?” Your breath whisks along the top of his knuckles and you inch closer to him until your knees bump into his thighs and your limbs tangle together. If you have to, you’ll pull him down from the sky with your own two hands until he’s safe and warm.
In the darkness, Saeyoung shakes his head and you can feel the movements beside you. “They remind me of you, though. They help me get home.”
You wish it didn’t make so much sense, but it does. The first night you pull away to your unreachable place, he sits beside you and strokes your hair while you cry. After the spell passes and the exhaustion slips over you like a veil, he hums his favorite radio hit until you finally fall asleep. Saeyoung can be callous, but he holds you like glass on those nights, soothing you as if the overexposure to his affection will harm you.
He is so much harder to reach. Saeyoung is so present that it is dangerous to interact with him because he isn’t present, isn’t at all invested in anything but the elliptical orbit of the planets. Sometimes, you’re scared that he’ll hurt himself from carelessness.
On a night like this, where the moon is hidden from both of you, he seems strangely transparent. “I want you to dance with me,” he says softly, and you find a blush creeping over your cheeks despite yourself. “On the moon, you don’t need music to dance.”
His grip is gentle, but pulling at your wrists. “Of course you don’t need music,” you mumble, because space is a vacuum and there is no air, and therefore no music, but, “all of the falling rocks give you all of the rhythm you could ever need.”
Saeyoung laughs, and there is no pity in the edges of the noise. It’s the kind of laugh that pulls from the diaphragm and leaves no room for doubting its authenticity. You smile, and he must feel it against his hands because he pulls you out of bed carefully. You have to swing your legs in front of you as he catches you stumbling your way to your feet.
The floor is cold, but Saeyoung’s hands are surprisingly warm. One of them curls around your waist and the other uses your hand to lead, a careful sway towards the center of the room. You remember learning your way around the house in the dark, how many weeks it had finally been until you could use the restroom in the middle of the night without tripping over things. It’d been a silent accomplishment of yours, and it shines even brighter in this moment of insanity, in this moment where the two of you aren’t on Earth any more.
But you’re together.
“I love these stars,” he says with a voice so powerful that you can feel his gilded words strike through your chest. He doesn’t say it, but you know what it means. You’ve learned to read between the lines of his celestial allusions, learned to decompose the metaphors for what they truly are.
He loves you.
Saeyoung’s forehead bumps yours and up close, you can see his eyes. He’s not wearing his glasses and his lashes are stuck together, but you’ve never seen anything this magnificent in your life. At four o’clock in the morning, you’re dancing in his bedroom underneath plastic stars, thinking about how cold your feet would be on the moon, thinking about how he loves the stars and the moon and you.
“Oh no,” he laments, resting his head against yours, “I think I’m losing altitude. Crashing back down onto planet Earth.”
It feels like a relief, though you want to know what made him escape in the first place. Could it have been an unpleasant nightmare? Or the adjustments of Saeran sleeping only one room away from him? The flood of memories that seem to swarm him at any given moment?
You decide it isn’t your place to ask. Not right now, with Saeyoung so vulnerable, still twirling you around the bedroom. He gives you a clumsy kiss, brushing at the edge of your mouth, and you can’t help but stutter out your words. “Is—Is that s-so?”
When he laughs for the final time, it’s soft. You can tell it’s in mockery of you, but you don’t mind it. Anything to hear the fun-loving laugh of his without some façade to uphold. Hearing Saeyoung laugh in the middle of the night makes you feel like you’re rich.
“It is so,” he confesses, smiling. “There’s some light, guiding me back to this world.” You can’t help the warmth his words make you feel. This time, when he pulls you close, you make sure to catch his lips in a proper kiss, blinking slowly until the stars are nothing but blurs of color behind your eyelids.
The second time, it sounds like thunder. You almost don’t wake up except for the screaming that follows the resounding steps down the hallway, and you grumble to yourself.
“Saeran!” You can hear Saeyoung screaming, and now you’re certain that he’s the one running down the hallways until you can pick out another pair of footsteps. “Saeran, come with me to the moon! Space is nothing without my dearest brother!”
You don’t have to see the two of them chasing one another throughout the house because you laugh anyway, the kind of laugh that pulls from the diaphragm and leaves no room for doubting its authenticity. Beneath the plastic stars, you remember that he loves you.
The moon has never seemed any closer than it does now.